We are humans. All our friends, mentors and family are. And we are here, dominating this planet. If we never developed, would other intelligent species took over the planet one day? Could dolphins, elephants, crows, chimps, dogs or perhaps rats give rise to a new civilization? Would they be “gentler” with the Nature and each other than we have been? We can not know at the moment.

For all our sins, we are the only force so far which could potentially save life from a global disaster like an asteroid strike.

Wishing for our civilization to disappear, I think, is an immature way of thinking happening sometime withing environmentally aware community. I too might have been like this – when I was ten.

In the book “Ecovillage at Ithaca” (a useful record of an ecovillage development and a part of my ever growing list of potentially useful books for creating new ways of living)

Liz Walker starts with describing her young son’s attitude, his wish for humans to “just die of” because of species disappearing at an incredible rate. She herself, although shocked, could see his point, as “at the beginning of the 21st century, we face a world that is falling apart at the seams“…

Is it? Or we humans just intrinsically like tragedy, our media picks up on this and paint us a, alas, desirable picture of “our world … drenched in the blood of seemingly endless warfare” and “miserable living conditions for much of the world’s population“.

If we wont to build a real better future, we have to deal with facts, not the ever-changing media theater. Violence, disease and poverty are the enemies of our future. What has been happening to them?

First, I would recommend the well known Steven Pinker’s book

where he meticulously proves the diminishing of violence through the history and talks about the reasons for this.

Life is wonderful. One of its miracles is the ability to recover. There have been a series of devastating mass extinctions throughout the geologic history of our planet. In some cases up to 60 percent of species were gone. Of course, it took Nature from 20 to 100 million years to recover the biodiversity (see

for more information). We may argue, that the life would never evolve to be so inventive and resilient if not for those extinction events, but we don’t need another one. According to WWF at the moment we might be loosing between 0.01 and 0.1 percent of all species per year which is 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. We took over the planet, this changed all the ecosystems… Bit since we realised what is happening we ought to change. It could be that the knowledge itself makes it impossible for humanity to avoid the coming change.

Living this change, this is the purpose of the Good New Town project. It has to have solid foundation: verifiable data. Doom and gloom might induce some people to act – for a while. Only complete honesty can sustain the movement.

So let’s question every piece of information coming to us, examine the evidence and try to accept the world as it is.

Often we can hear that it is the modern “civilized” humans that exploit and destroy the nature, while the indigenous cultures lived in good balance with the land for many generations. Was this always the rule? The way in which the latest extinction of megafauna happened suggest otherwise.

An analysis of the timing of Holarctic megafaunal extinctions and extirpations over the last 56,000 years has revealed a tendency for such events to cluster within interstadials, periods of abrupt warming, but only when humans were also present. Humans may have impeded processes of migration and recolonization that would otherwise have allowed the megafaunal species to adapt to the climate shift.[46] “

Stone age humans, as close to nature as anyone could be, were bringing the destruction as soon as they could, everywhere they spread. All our ancestors did it. Only then, when perhaps the easy prey was gone, the balance in new ecosystems eventually was established. That’s how Nature works. Any species suddenly received an advantage would spread till stopped by famine, predators and disease.

Only now, when our intelligence has grown enough, we started to think about future. We don’t want to spread till we have to starve because there’s no more resources. We want to study and save other species, even ones which have no nutritional or aesthetic value for us.

There’s no need to do human-bashing. We’ve been very “natural” so far in our desire to spread and conquer. Then our intelligence happened, completely naturally too. Perhaps other intelligent species will rise on this Earth later. We don’t really know if they are going to be gentle with their environment. For us, it is time to search for the new balance on the new level.

I think for the happy future life there must be lots of happy beautiful rituals, bringing joy for all. Nothing dogmatic or superstitious.

We need to gather all those seeds of goodness through the past and grow them into tomorrow’s blossoms.

Seth Godin just did this with Thanksgiving. “This is a holiday about gratitude, about family and about possibility. It brings people together to not only celebrate the end of the harvest, but to look one in another in the eye and share something magical.”

In his article “Britain’s Dangerous New Tribalism” Kenan Malik argues for the first. My feeling is that for the duration of all our human history and prehistory people had to belong to tribes, casts and classes without their choise. Now we can choose and new voluntary groups of people are forming.

As long as the group ideology is not dogmatic and people are free to leave I see this as a positive trend. Hopefully the time will come when people will be able to decide where exactly to live based on where like-minded people are living. This is a way to form friendly neighborhoods, real intentional communities everywhere.

I should admit straight away that I don’t know much about eco-villages, but I want to learn. Because I feel that lots of things gone wrong with today’s living. Because I’ve seen how some things could be done better.

I am talking about my childhood and student memories. It’s not just me: I’ve heard stories of people joining or starting eco-villages and intentional communities for the similar “nostalgic” reasons.

When me and my friends were kids in 1970s-1980s Russia, our grannies and grandads were WWII survivors. They mended clothes, cooked homemade meals, never would waste anything. In summer, when they stayed with us at the countryside, they would grow fruits, herbs and vegetables (and also of course flowers), they would burn all paper and wood for heating and cooking, they would compost all organic waste, they would pick wild berries, herbs and mushrooms, which they would preserve, can or dry. Nobody had to do all this, but it was perceived as a part of good healthy life.

We were free range kids, in summer playing in the forest and loving exploring wild nature. We never had any “play dates” – we could knock on each other door at any time. We shared books and things. We learned skills from our “survivalist” grandparents. We were inventing our own games and making our own toys. Later we would create our own plays or sing our favourite songs around campfires. I thought this was how life supposed to be. It was far from perfect, but it was good.

Then came isolation and disconnection… Some of my grown up life package was actually great: like the possibilities to learn anything through the Internet, to travel, to start my own family or to try creating an online business (although this didn’t quite worked out yet).

I am wondering if it is possible to have the best of both worlds? To live closer to Nature, to each other, be efficient and environmentally friendly but without giving up the privileges of being also close to the whole wide world and of doing our dream jobs according to our abilities and interests.

I am going to research how this could be done. What I suspect already is that we can’t build a good community without honestly, transparency and respect of different ways in which people would want to contribute and to do good things. Because a good deed done by order stops being a good deed. This is why I think that instead of creating strict rules and regulations (which happens in some communities) it would be better to give people opportunities, examples, incentives and encouragement. Let the good life win because it is better.

Alexandra Cook is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk